The Seafarer is a big play set in a little room. Comprising nothing more than the banter of old friends (and one diabolical houseguest) in an Irish basement on Christmas Eve, it warmly and humanely paints its characters' portraits as completely as any play can: their histories, flaws, world views, and most private pains. Its playwright's eternal muses are grief, guilt, and redemption, but The Seafarer goes much further. In a sustained moment of uncharacteristic kindness, McPherson wrote his Christmas story as an ode to unconquerable fraternal love — a love that remains strong even when battered senseless by (literally) the forces of hell. It would be difficult to imagine McPherson's script brought off more beautifully than it was at Mosaic Theatre last fall. If you went, you experienced mirth, dread, joy, sorrow, and a kind of moral clarity that you might call "enlightenment" — a stuffed-stocking bounty of thoughts and feelings greater than any piece of art is obliged to supply and which Mosaic nevertheless graciously proffered.

Wrecks was last season's hardest-to-watch play, dealing with weakness, loneliness, desperation, and dysfunction in such a personal way that audiences actually left embarrassed — like they'd unwittingly paid to be peeping Toms for a night. With Wrecks gone from our stages and unlikely to reappear any time soon, it's probably safe to explain that its central conceit is the interior monologue of a widower at his wife's funeral. As the widower and play's sole actor, Gordon McConnell reveals that the deceased was much older, that his thing for older women stems from having been given up by his birth mother as a baby, and that his dead wife and long-lost mother are in fact the same person. McConnell's a brilliant actor and a grizzled vet of stage shows of every kind. Here, he ambled back and forth across the stage, spoke softly, allowed his sentences to wander aimlessly and trail off into silence, and generally behaved as though no one was watching. He was as distraught, scatterbrained, and introverted as any real-life mourner. He had clearly found some way to sympathize with his character's complex complexes and, in doing so in such an unshowbizzy way, forced the rest of us — folks who are usually turned off by the thought of marrying our mums — to do likewise.

Eugene Ionesco's plays are fantastical imaginative flights with no stable anchors in the real world. His characters often speak nonsense words, swing from states of extreme agitation to euphoria with no obvious catalyst, and find themselves in unlikely or impossible situations. It takes a good actor to connect this stuff to an audience in any way beyond the abstractly cerebral, and Barbara Bradshaw is very, very good. In The Chairs, she played one-half of an elderly couple (the other half was played by the excellent Dan Leonard) scurrying to set up chairs for a party taking place, either literally or figuratively, at the end of the world. At the party's climax, her husband intended to reveal the meaning of life. Of course, he didn't know the meaning of life (or anything else), as Bradshaw surely understood. No matter: This is a play about, among other things, the pitiable nature of the male ego and the way a woman coddles, boosts, and ultimately devours it in a cannibalistic orgy of mother love. Bradshaw got it just right. Her wide eyes and beatifically smiling face appraised her spouse like he was some combination of kitten, baby, and dinner, but she never showed her cards. From the beginning of the play to its crazy, apocalyptic end, she exuded a kindness so warm, thick, and impenetrable that only later, after leaving the play, might one realize how close it came to suffocating all present.

It has been a good year for South Florida's quirky local indie darling Rachel Goodrich, what with a glowing shoutout from the New York Times this past December and her official debut appearance at SXSW this past spring. It was all well-deserved and timed with the October 2008 release of her debut full-length, Tinker Toys. Like the playthings from which it cribs its name, the album is sophisticated in its simplicity and a whole lot of fun. A real lover of whimsy, Goodrich usually eschews the typical singer/songwriter guitar in favor of a wider swath of instruments, applying liberal doses of harmonica, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, xylophone, and even kazoo. She toys with her voice as well, shifting from a breathy whisper to an almost bluesy sigh, sort of like Billie Holiday gone twee-pop (just try to imagine it). Rather than being insufferably charming, though, the result is mentally indelible. For all her faux-naif trappings, Goodrich is an astonishingly mature crafter of melody, able to cinch clever wordplay and slightly hippied-out narrative into a recognizable pop structure. Occupying a rare creative space between the experimental stylings of acts like CocoRosie and the polish of VH1 faves like Sara Bareilles, Goodrich should soon rightfully take her place as South Florida's Next Big Thing.

Like Santa Claus, the Third Avenue Art District Artwalk comes but once a year. And although there are no chimneys involved, there are gifts — if you consider it a gift to visit the studios of local artists and get wined and dined along the way. This year, the evening threw in a free visit to the Museum of Art/Fort Lauderdale to see two knockout exhibitions ("Pablo Picasso Ceramics/Carlos Luna Paintings" and "Coming of Age: American Art 1850s-1950s"), a cool after-party at the Girls' Club Gallery, and trolley transportation to and from all of the above. The event has been going on since 1996 and has grown to include nine studios: those of Tobey Archer (mixed media), Madeline Denaro (painting), Janet Gold (collage), Francie Bishop Good (photography), Tin Ly (metal sculpture), Margi Glavovic Nothard (architecture), Rosanna Saccoccio (printmaking and collage), Mary Lou Siefker (painting), and Wilma Bulkin Siegel (painting). There's not a stinker in the bunch, and this year, several of the artists presented some of their most exciting work in ages.

Unfettered by the demands of the commercial marketplace, the privately supported Art and Culture Center has taken that freedom and run with it, charting a course that sometimes appears to be fearless. Where else, for instance, would you find something as esoteric as "Exploding the Lotus"? That multimedia show displayed the work of nearly two dozen artists from the Indian subcontinent with a strong emphasis on the conceptual. Or how about "Nathan Sawaya: The Art of the Brick," an exhibition of art made exclusively with Lego parts? And we're still scratching our heads over the quirkiness of the recent "TM Sisters: Idealtonight." Under such adventurous previous curators as Laurence Pamer and Samantha Salzinger, the center has long challenged established norms, preferring edge over ease. Current curator Jane Hart has pushed things even further, especially with the Project Room, which presents small shows of the sort you'd be unlikely to find anywhere else in the area.